The SEO Checklist for Vancouver Trades: 21 Things a Roofer, Plumber or Electrician’s Website Needs to Rank

Most Vancouver trade websites fail for the same boring reasons. Not because Google is mysterious, but because the site was built to look nice at a trade show and nobody ever went back and did the unglamorous work. This is that work, in the order we do it for clients.

Use it as a checklist. If you can tick fewer than ten of these, your competitors on Kingsway and in Burnaby are ranking above you for the searches that actually produce calls, like “emergency plumber Vancouver” and “roof repair North Vancouver”. Every item includes what “done” looks like so you can check your own site tonight.

Part one: the Google Business Profile (items 1 to 6)

For a trade, the map pack is the search result. Three businesses show up above everything else with a phone button, and most homeowners never scroll past them. Your Google Business Profile decides whether you are one of the three.

1. Primary category matches the job people search for. “Roofing contractor”, not “Contractor”. “Plumber”, not “Home services”. Add secondary categories for the other things you do, but the primary one carries the weight.
2. Address, phone and hours are identical everywhere. Same street abbreviation, same suite number, same phone on your profile, your website footer, Yelp, HomeStars, BBB and Canada411. Google cross-checks these and discounts profiles that disagree with the web.
3. Service areas cover where you actually drive. If you take jobs in Coquitlam and Langley, list them. If you do not go to Squamish, do not list it. A profile that claims all of BC ranks nowhere.
4. Services listed with descriptions and starting prices. A “Roof replacement, from $X” line does two things: it matches the service searches, and it filters out price shoppers before they ring.
5. Real photos of real jobs, added monthly. Truck, crew, before-and-after, the shop. Stock photos of a smiling actor in a hard hat are ignored by Google and mistrusted by homeowners.
6. Reviews that mention the service and the city. Twenty reviews saying “great guy” do less than five saying “replaced our furnace in Burnaby the same week”. Ask for the specific version. We cover exactly how in the reviews guide.

Part two: the pages (items 7 to 13)

7. One page per service. A single “Services” page with ten bullet points cannot rank for ten different jobs. Roof repair, roof replacement, gutters and skylights each need their own page with their own headline.
8. One page per city you want to win. “Plumber in Burnaby” is a different search from “plumber in Vancouver”, and Google shows different results. A short, honest page per city, with the neighbourhoods you cover and a job you did there, is enough. Ten near-identical copies are not; Google folds those together.
9. The city is in the headline, the title tag and the first paragraph. Not stuffed twenty times. Once each, naturally, where a reader would expect it.
10. A phone number that works with one tap on a phone. Most trade searches happen on a phone, often from a wet basement. The number is a link, it is above the fold, and it is the same number as your profile.
11. A short form above the fold. Name, phone, what happened. Not eleven fields. Long forms are where leads go to die.
12. Proof on the page. Review count, years in business, licence numbers, WorkSafeBC coverage, Technical Safety BC licence for gas and electrical. Homeowners in Metro Vancouver have been burned by unlicensed work and they look for these.
13. Real prices or price ranges. The pages that rank for “how much does a new roof cost in Vancouver” are the ones that answer it. A range with the reasons it varies beats silence every time.

Part three: the technical basics (items 14 to 18)

14. One H1 per page, and it says what the page is about. A surprising number of builder-made sites have no H1 at all, or five. Google reads the heading structure before it reads anything else.
15. Loads in under three seconds on a phone. Compress images, drop the sliders, host video off-site. Test with PageSpeed Insights and fix the red items first.
16. Every page has a unique title tag under 60 characters and a description under 155. These are your ad in the search results. Write them like an ad.
17. Local business schema on the site. Structured data that tells Google your name, address, phone, hours, areas served and services in machine-readable form. Rank Math or Yoast can produce it; the values must match your profile exactly.
18. No broken links and no redirect chains. Old service pages should redirect once to the new page, not to the homepage, and not through three hops.

Part four: the things that separate page one from page three (items 19 to 21)

19. Links from local sites. Suppliers, the BBB, trade associations, the local business improvement association, the charity run you sponsored. Ten genuine local links outweigh a thousand from directories nobody visits.
20. Content that answers the questions your dispatcher hears every week. “Can I run a furnace on a generator during an outage?” “Do I need a permit to replace a panel in Vancouver?” Those questions are searched, and the answers rank when a real tradesperson writes them.
21. Tracking, so you know which of the first twenty items paid for themselves. Call tracking on the website number, Google Analytics 4 with form submissions as conversions, and a monthly look at which pages produced calls. Without this, SEO is a feeling. With it, it is a budget line with a return.

How long this takes

Items 1 to 6 move map rankings inside 60 to 90 days for most Metro Vancouver trades. Items 7 to 13 are two to four weeks of building. The technical items are a week. The last three never stop. Max Roofing started with a referral-only business that did not appear for a single service-area search; four years of this list took it from $150K to $2M in annual revenue, with more than 30 new roofs from search in a single season. You can read the numbers in the Max Roofing case study.

Want the list checked against your site by a person rather than a tool? Digital Trek’s SEO plans for Vancouver trades start at $1,500 a month and begin with a free audit that tells you which of the 21 items you are missing. Book a free strategy call.

Related guides

• SEO myths Vancouver contractors still pay for
• Local SEO for Vancouver plumbers
• How to structure a Vancouver electrician’s website
• SEO services for Vancouver trades
• SEO for Small Business: Do-It-Right Without Wasting Budget

Frequently asked questions

Does my trade business need SEO if I am already running Google Ads?

Yes, for two reasons. The map pack and organic results sit under the ads and get most of the clicks for “near me” searches, and Google Ads charges less per click when the landing page is already relevant and fast. Most of our clients run both.

How much does SEO cost for a Vancouver contractor?

Agencies in Vancouver charge between $1,000 and $6,000 a month. Digital Trek plans start at $1,500 and most trade clients invest $2,000 to $4,000 a month depending on how many services and cities they want to rank for. Below $1,000 you are usually buying a monthly report, not work.

Can I do this checklist myself?

Items 1 to 6 and 10 to 13, yes, in an afternoon with this list. The page building, schema and link work are where owners usually hand it off, because the crews need to be on roofs, not in WordPress.

Which cities should a Vancouver trade target first?

The ones you already drive to most. For most clients that is Vancouver, Burnaby, Richmond, North Vancouver and Surrey, then Coquitlam, New Westminster and Langley once the first group ranks.